A meeting of many faiths in Huntington Beach

I got the invitation late and I had other plans for Sunday night. So I had mixed feelings about going to the Thanksgiving service organized by the Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council.

When I pulled into the Warner Avenue parking lot of the Community United Methodist Church, I hardly expected to find every parking space with a car in it. As I drove up and down nearby residential streets looking for a spot to park my car, I was tempted to pull back onto Warner and go home. As I walked to the church from the dimly lighted street where I finally left my car, I was tempted again but didn’t give in.

I asked a man standing in the church’s driveway how to find the event and he showed me to the door. In the foyer, someone smiled and handed me a service program with a brightly colored, glossy cover. A crowd still coming in behind me pressed me into the church’s large sanctuary, which was nearly as full as the parking lot.

Chatter rose under the high ceiling of the room. I was early but very few seats were empty among the pews. As I scanned the room, everyone looked so pleased to be there I quit thinking about my previous plans for the evening and started looking for familiar faces and a place to sit.

In the last pew against the back wall of the church I found Sue Smith, longtime secretary for the Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council. She moved further into the pew to make room for me.

I don’t want to say I was surprised by the sizable turnout. If I was, I probably shouldn’t have been. I’ve attended the council’s annual May Prayer Breakfast more than once; it always draws a standing-room-only crowd.

The council’s New Year Procession of Lights sometimes enjoyed the same turnout, depending on the weather. This year, there will be no procession. . The Community Interfaith Thanksgiving Service, the first of what hopes to be an annual event, stands to replace it.

The service was ambitious for a first-time event, incorporating three hymns with a dozen prayers and readings from as many faith traditions, including Buddhism, Protestantism, the Bahai faith, Judaism, Islam, Roman Catholicism, the Sikh faith, the Church of Religious Science, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Episcopal Church and Zoroastrianism.

To the great delight of the children within my view, Joel Rosen sounded a call to prayer on a traditional Shofar, the ram’s horn instrument most often associated with Rosh Hashanah. “How does he hold his breath that long?” I heard someone whisper as the Shofar’s blast resonated for what seemed like an eternity. I wondered the same thing.

Two women, Rene Banchiere and Renate Goutier, offered a liturgical dance -- from what tradition wasn’t clear. I’ve heard of liturgical dance but never seen it practiced, unless the dancing in the Crystal Cathedral’s “The Glory of Christmas” nativity play meets the criteria. I asked Smith what faith community the women were from. She asked me what language the music they danced to was in.

Neither of us had an answer for the other’s question. If I could have found Banchiere or Goutier at the reception after the service, I would have asked them. I’m hoping I can track them down and talk to them at another time.

I’d like to know where they worship, what faith they embrace, what language their accompaniment was in, how they got involved with liturgical dance and, especially, what their dance meant. No one else I asked knew any more than Smith and I did.

The highlights of the prayers and readings were, for me, hearing Maria Khani read from the Koran in Arabic, which sounded as lyrical as song; hearing the Rev. Christian Mondor from St. Bonaventure Catholic Church recite St. Francis of Assisi’s mystical “Canticle of the Creatures”; and hearing Maneck Bhujwala pray a Zoroastrian prayer in Avesta, an ancient Iranian language.

Bhujwala’s traditional prayer was presented in the service program, which thoughtfully included the text for all of the hymns, readings and prayers, in both Avesta and in English.

The 17-page service went remarkably fast. It was well organized by the council’s president, Rabbi Michael Mayersohn, and a 10-member committee chaired by Rachelle Clifford.

The reception that followed featured bread and water, which might sound like a jailhouse diet, but it was a gourmet wonderland for anyone who delights in homemade-style bread. The bread was plentiful, in variety as well as quantity. I heard more than one person say they were going to indulge in “just one more piece” before calling it a night.

Far more people than I would have predicted stayed around to sample the bread and mingle in the church’s courtyard, which on a comfortably cool November night provided ample room to socialize. I stayed longer than I had planned.

I got to talk with people who approached me to tell me they regularly read this column, and I found religious leaders with whom I’d been trying to connect or who had been trying to connect with me, among them Deacon Patricia Milliard, who is new to St. Wilfrid of York Episcopal Church, and Maneck “Mike” Bhujwala and his wife, Mahrukh.

Bhujwala, a realtor with Tarbell in Huntington Beach, is also a priest at the California Zoroastrian Center, which is closer to my Surf City home than downtown Huntington Beach, but I’d never managed to find the 8,000 square-foot temple that sits on 47,000 square feet of ground. A few days ago I did.

It’s a brown stucco building sandwiched between an orthopedic center and a nondenominational Christian church on Hazard, just west of Magnolia, at the edge of a large residential neighborhood. The façade is graced with four pillars, each capped with two bull torsos. Over the glass entrance is a sculpted winged figure surrounded by the words, “Good Thoughts,” “Good Words,” “Good Deeds.” It’s the largest Zoroastrian center outside of Iran, Pakistan and India. It sits right out our city’s back door.

Recently, when I wrote on the history of gratitude in classic and popular literature, science and religion, I had wanted to talk to someone about its tradition in Zoroastrianism. I mentioned that to Maneck and Mahrukh Bhujwala while eating bread and sipping spring water after the Thanksgiving service. Bhujwala later sent me an e-mail telling me about a thanksgiving prayer written by the Zoroastrian high priest during the reign of the Persian Sassanid dynasty.

“We thank God, Ahuramazda (Wise Lord), for creating all good things in the world,” he wrote, “and for giving us the faculty of speech and for sending on earth, the divine soul in the form of our prophet, Zarathushtra Spitaman (pronounced as Zoroaster by ancient Greek philosophers who studied his teachings) who illuminated us with knowledge (innate and learned) so that we may follow the right path and avoid the suffering resulting from wrong choices.”

The five dozen or so houses of worship in Huntington Beach are on the whole Christian. The city has one Jewish synagogue, the Chabad Adat Israel. There is also the storefront Tolerance Foundation, faith home to a small congregation of mostly Turkish Muslims. The effect is to make the city appear more religiously homogenous than it is.

The Community Interfaith Thanksgiving Service shined some light on that. I hope in the coming months to do more of that too.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].

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